Semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic applications, such as personal computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and other electronic equipment. Semiconductor devices are typically fabricated by sequentially depositing insulating or dielectric layers, conductive layers, and semiconductive layers of material over a semiconductor substrate, and patterning the various material layers using lithography to form circuit components and elements thereon. Many integrated circuits are typically manufactured on a single semiconductor wafer, and individual dies on the wafer are singulated by sawing between the integrated circuits along a scribe line. The individual dies are typically packaged separately, in multi-chip modules, for example, or in other types of packaging.
Magnetic Random Access Memory (MRAM), based on the integration of silicon CMOS with Magnetic Tunneling Junction (MTJ) technology, is a major emerging technology that is highly competitive with existing semiconductor memories such as Static Random Access Memory (SRAM), Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), and Flash.
Although existing semiconductor memory structures and methods for forming the same have been generally adequate for their intended purposes they have not been entirely satisfactory in all respects.